Category Archives: pain

Planting Stones

26 Thursday Jun 2025

Posted by in Earth, family, generations, human, movement, offering, Opening, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, release, return, unlearning, walking, woman, wonder, work

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A fresh blood, now, runs from this wound,

dripping thick, womb-blood red,

to thirsty ground.

The trail follows me as I leave,

planting stones.

Each feeds dark Earth,

sticks weapons of their confusion, fast.

My back, low belly, my heart unwilling,

unaccepting soft targets,

half a lifetime on.

Planting stones returns

this deepest and cruel ancestral story

to the Mother who fashions stone into gold,

medallions for witful generations to come.

Flowers may bloom, cool waters may move,

Hummingbird brings those open prayers

to Heaven.

It ends with me.

I walk away into land of blowing dust,

with stars shining straight from the hands of God,

I walk away toward the fire

ever burning on…

Mettle

02 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by in abundance, approaching, beauty, becoming, companion, courage, dark, devotion, discomfort, dreaming, fertile, food, Found, freedom, human, Love, loving, medicine, movement, night, offering, Opening, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, receiving, release, return, storm, water, welcoming, wonder, work

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Withstand the Void.

Please.

Be upon your own two small feet,

at the edge,

darkness cloud-forming,

ledge a tipping perch.

Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,

the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.

Call forth in echoless open and

wait,

the wind will snap and take it up.

Let the Void offer

all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,

rage, grief, shame and sorrows.

Be with them.

Sense their intolerable

movements in your one body–

these are the monsters

you are to marry.

In union, living through and beyond

your exiled, an invitation

to what Beauty is yours deeply,

the gift to be offered back.

Leave no aspect behind–

you are here to love the denied.

Blood needs circulate.

Bones need grow. Air must enter.

Bring the outcasts and castaways under

warmth of your grand cloak.

Allow them refuge of your beating heart.

Welcome the unwanted,

a feast-filled table is set to feed everything

in dawn of this new year.

Holy rage

14 Thursday Nov 2024

Posted by in community, Creating, daughter, digging, dissolution, Elements, fearlessness, Fire, generations, history, honoring, human, instinct, Love, mother, movement, Opening, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, rage, strength, violence, woman, work

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I see her, red hair aflame,

paint flying.

Swaths of blackest black,

gashes of scarlet–

blood, bone, ash, scorch,

ochre of marrow.

Enough words, make image.

Shock the system with truth,

Pandora’s box wide,

coffins nesting

and thrown open, skulls screaming out,

souls of generation upon generation of women:

This will not stand.

This will not stand.

No!

Twisted linen

20 Monday May 2024

Posted by in generations, movement, mystery, offering, pain, poems, poetry, the road, weaving

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Twisted linen in the closet:

rumpled skirt, wrinkled vest..

Who would imagine shirts

could dent.

Comical to even consider remedying that.

Seems I can not stay put.

A magnet polarized from place

when place is done.

Not that I want to be washed from the creekbed.

I’ve bolted, leapt, flown, jumped and been

catapulted;

I’m praying for a gentler crossing

this go round.

The hanging lines held in linen

are a telling road map

of more to come.

8

03 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by in pain, poems, poetry, receiving, slow

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Walking into the kitchen,

sleepy and 8 and nightgowned and knowing,

her mother sits at the kitchen counter

harming herself

again,

she speaks up, for the first time,

trying to stop her.

The girl is sent away

sharply,

that cut deep in her heart following her,

a small needy dog, for decades.

Until, one morning,

under broad green whispering trees,

cicadas thrumming toward full release of day,

her heart receives what grace that rejection was–

for had her plea changed the course

of her mother’s pain

she would have become indentured servant

to an identity:

I help, therefore I am.

In that grace came release from a lifetime

of doing others’ work for them,

the danger of not existing unless

she were needed.

In her corner

18 Thursday May 2023

Posted by in anger, father, food, grief, mother, movement, pain, poems, poetry, story, water, words

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She sits in her corner, turning page

after paper page…

Held by two walls, floor and wood ceiling,

she removes herself

from still more broken connection.

Out there, nothing but loss.

In here, with pictures and stories, friends and

a giving, participatory world.

With father gone for work, back for dinner,

home only for irritation, judgment and sleep,

With mother avoiding pain through worry,

busyness and food,

anger unthinkable,

The girl is left knowing–

beyond the material,

she’s on her own.

Books act as balm

until, later, distance and exploration

return her to the early grief

of being alone

surrounded by people.

The nectar soothes her broken heart,

tear by reclaimed tear.

Twisted

30 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in beauty, break out, change, generations, learning, light, pain, poems, poetry

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Had I never entered this country

dark magic would have remained part

of fairy tales.

But tales are born of happenings,

not purely imagination.

What can be directed towards light can also

be twisted black.

Centuries of pain does that

to people’s souls,

leading them to avenge this blessed world.

Living amongst the workings,

talk will be talk, suspicion

suspicion,

and yet what I’ve seen

turns firm ground to putty.

You’d best not leave any hair behind.

Still, the cruelty that fuels and fires does,

in the end, destroy

those who’ve let ghosts poison them.

And the original curse

rolling through the generations lives on

until someone down the line breaks it

by gathering up their own light.

Crying to stop

27 Thursday Apr 2023

Posted by in history, pain, poems, poetry

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Crying

to stop the dread,

‘Please don’t make me go.’

Crying to be heard,

‘Don’t make me go.’

She pauses. (Thankfully.)

My small body leans, limp,

into hers. Hers sits now

on couch spine, hands around me.

Before us, the hall yawns toward stern front door.

‘Please can I stay home today?’

Another shudder,

more tears.

In my growing self I know

what school takes, what it gives away

as if useless and bad.

But.

I was marched out to face again

what I hated,

and these many years later I know–

had my little heart been heard

that day my life would have changed.

When touched

24 Monday Apr 2023

Posted by in Love, lovers, loving, naked, pain, poems, poetry, prayer

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When touched, woman’s nipples are not to pucker inward,

When touched, woman’s soft cave is not to dry and contract,

When touched, her heart is not to hide away while

her clothes are removed.

When touched.

This earth, this fertile woman

bringing all life, creating

breathing pulsing offering–

always offering–

She is not meant

to be gashed stripped clawed mined

TAKEN

.

When touched, we women

are to be held, to be sung to, to be danced with,

our laughter our moisture rising

to swaddle and bathe the world.

Sing to us, allow us, see, listen to, wait for and

welcome us…

Let our own hands guide you.

When touched,

above all

be gentle.

Perhaps

28 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by in change, learning, loving, pain, poems, poetry, rage, work

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How do we tender the fire,

walk the line,

embody a waking spectrum of both

the violence within–that murderous rage–

and the sacred Spirit we carry?

How do we live between

the harm we are capable of and

the goodness of our natural being?

Until each of us faces that living death,

cashes in the chips of our denial,

we humans will continue to destroy one another,

our earthen home,

and ourselves.

Let’s rise to the task.

We have, perhaps, no better work to do.